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Date:      Thu, 18 Jan 2001 00:14:03 -0600
From:      Christopher Schulte <christopher@schulte.org>
To:        jason@routermonkey.com
Cc:        Mark.Andrews@nominum.com, Mike Andrews <mandrews@bit0.com>, stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Weird sporadic DNS resolution problems
Message-ID:  <20010118001402.A60881@schulte.org>
In-Reply-To: <20010113123754.B1299@fry.routermonkey.com>
References:  <20010113123754.B1299@fry.routermonkey.com>

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> The interesting difference in my problem (I think it's interesting...)
> is that neither of the nameservers for dml.com are lame; they both
> return valid A records for dml.com using dig, but my named seems to
> think that there isn't an A record until I stop and restart named.
> Then, when I do an nslookup / dig, it returns the correct result for
> a while, until it stops working again.

For what it's worth, my take:

This could be broken down into a 2-part problem.  One being bind not returning
DNS data to sendmail, and two being that sendmail then defers the message based
on the assumption that the lack of DNS data is in fact real.

Sendmail is doing exactly what it should, IMHO.  It relies on correct information 
from its nameserver(s), which in this case I don't think it's getting.

I ran into the *exact* same problem with bind on a Linux machine.  I then
had several FreeBSD (and other *nixes like Solaris, OpenBSD, etc) fail
with sendmail because my linux server would not give out data on domains
for which:

1) the master servers did not set the authority bit in their DNS responses.
2) the TTL on the MX record for the domain was set to some low value, like
3600 seconds.

Every single domain which sendmail had these delivery problems matched those
two criteria points.  What would happen is that on a bind restart, the MX
data would be correctly cached for the TTL period (usually one hour) and then
subsequent MX record lookups after the TTL expired would return serverfail,
and from that point on sendmail would defer the mail because it thought the
sender domain did not exist (and thus probably spam).

Now, It seems like this problem sprouted its head when I moved up to bind
8.2.2-P7 from 8.2.2-P5.  The BSD (Open, Free) boxes all had either 822p7, or
some 823.

Could this be a result of broken master nameservers and a change in how
bind handled their responses?

Flame away if I'm totally wrong.

-- 
christopher matthew schulte
geek boy gone bad
christopher@schulte.org
http://www.schulte.org/


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